For a long time now, it has been fashionable to blame Germany for the problems of the euro. In its recent bi-annual currency report, the US went a stage further, and accused Europe’s largest economy not just of deepening the continent’s travails, but of adding a deflationary bias to the entire world economy.

Attitudes have hardened further since it emerged that German representatives at the European Central Bank led the revolt of Northern states against last week’s interest rate cut, and have been attempting to obstruct much else deemed necessary to ease the plight of the eurozone periphery.

Even the normally ultra loyal Olli Rehn, the European economics commissioner, together with his director general for economic affairs, Marco Buti, seem to have joined in the German bashing – well, sort of.

In a new blog, Mr Rehn says he may this week launch an “in-depth review of the German economy”, using a European Union procedure for examining macro-economic imbalances in the region.

Mr Buti is meanwhile widely accused in Berlin of trying to pin it all on the beastly Germans, though it is hard to find any evidence for it in what he has said publicly. To the extent that Mr Buti, an Italian, is guilty of finger pointing, he presumably reserves his strictures for private consumption.

In any case, to blame Germans for standing in the way of a resurgent Europe is just a little too convenient. It also misdiagnoses the nature of Europe’s problem. It’s not Germany, still less its economic success – if indeed you count expected growth this year of just 0.5pc as success – which is at the root of the difficulty; it’s the euro.

I’ve found it impossible to ascertain who was originally responsible for the expression “one size fits all monetary policy”; Eddie George, former governor of the Bank of England, used it in the context of the single currency as far back as the late 1990s, though it possibly has a much longer pedigree.

Yet the problem it defines is the same today as it has always been; any attempt to set a single interest rate for 17 politically and fiscally sovereign nations is almost by definition doomed to failure. Perpetual crisis is more or less guaranteed.

It is hard enough setting monetary policy just for a single country, as Britain, the US and Japan in their very different ways are currently demonstrating.

Since becoming Governor of the Bank of England last July, Mark Carney has made promoting demand by reassuring households and businesses that interest rates won’t be raised prematurely his first order of priority.

Already he’s struggling to hold the line, though I guess this could be counted a mark of success. Growth is exceeding all expectations, making the Bank’s employment dependent commitment not to raise interest rates for at least three years look somewhat meaningless.

This is, of course, a nice problem to have. From the moment the crisis began more than five years ago, the Bank was far too optimistic both on growth and inflation. The one disappointed on the downside, the other on the upside.

But now the reverse problem is establishing itself. Growth has come steaming back, and unemployment is falling much more swiftly than thought likely.

This week’s Inflation Report will have to acknowledge these realities. Mr Carney said in August that the Bank would not even consider raising rates until unemployment falls to 7pc. That point now looks like being reached sooner rather than later. True, inflation is also falling slightly faster than anticipated, but this is almost wholly down to a stronger pound, which in turn is caused by rising interest rate expectations.

Keeping the lid on interest rates is proving a challenge. Calls for a rise are growing, but they cannot be answered at least until unemployment falls beneath the designated threshold. Members of the Monetary Policy Committee have bound themselves into a kind of self-denying ordinance. More cautious voices on the Committee must restrain their inner hawk.

Mr Carney’s strategy may or may not be a mistake, as indeed the even more expansionary monetary policies being pursued in both the US and Japan might be as well. Yet in all three of these cases, at least we know the central bank is operating in ways it believes to be in its sponsoring country’s best interests.

With the ECB, that can never be the case. By statute, it is bound to juggle the priorities of 17 different moving parts. The resulting, aggregated mess is neither fish nor fowl, and basically of no use to anyone.

Germans believe that monetary policy is being run for the benefit of the profligate Club Med, while the periphery think it run for the economically dominant core.

In the early years of the euro, monetary policy was set loose to support a struggling Germany. From a German perspective, it should very probably have been looser still, but even as it stood, it was far too accommodative for much of the periphery, where it helped inflate unsustainable construction, banking and spending bubbles.

Today, the problem has been somewhat reversed. Germany is hardly booming, but unemployment is at record lows, skilled labour shortages abound and house prices are rising strongly, by German standards at least.

Meanwhile, inflation is turning negative in parts of the eurozone periphery. But please don’t call it deflation. No, in euro-speak, this is a relative price adjustment, which will in time render these countries more competitive.

Perhaps, but what it also does is constrain demand and increase the size of existing debt burdens; these countries need decent levels of nominal GDP growth if they are ever to repay their debts, not relative price adjustment.

Now switch to Germany, where the priority in a now fast ageing society is all about saving at the expense of current consumption. Negotiations around the formation of a new government have already conceded a minimum wage and higher government investment. Germans believe they are doing more than they should to support demand in Europe, and utterly reject the idea of further fiscal or economic policy action to correct imbalances.

The same goes for monetary policy. For Germans, the European Central Bank’s 2pc inflation target is fine just as long as it doesn’t mean inflation in Germany rising to more than 2pc. The rather higher rate of inflation necessary to allow the periphery a decent level of nominal GDP growth is regarded as anathema by most Germans – and quite right too in most respects.

Germany didn’t set out to design an economic model that impoverishes much of the rest of Europe. Unfortunately, it did acquiesce in the euro, which prevents the natural market remedy of free-floating exchange rates and the application by nations of self-interested monetary policy. The fault lies not with hard working Germans, but the folly of Europe’s policy elite.